Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Ashis Nandy lectures

Dr Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist and social theorist whose path-breaking work has revitalized scholarship on political psychology, the Indian encounter with colonialism, mass violence, nationalism and culture. In 2008, he was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by the journal Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One of his most celebrated books, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), is currently being honored as it comes out in its 30th edition.

Dr Nandy is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

The Center for South Asia together with the Stanford Humanities Center organised a lecture by Ashis Nandy on 6 March 2009. The title of the lecture was:"The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia".

Ajit Sanzgiri, who attended the lecture, wrote:

A Post-Secular Intellectual

I attended the talk. It was more a look at the life of Vinayak Savarkar - arguably the father of Hindu nationalism in India. Much of it was uncontroversial (at least to people who don't hold Savarkar in high regard) and unsurprising. So let me just quote the bits that seemed 'interesting'.

Right in the beginning, Dr. Nandy said the practice of biography is somewhat different in South Asia than in the rest of the world - by which I presume he meant Western scholarship. Biographies in S. Asia either tend to be pamphleteer rants - in which he included A G Noorani's biography of Savarkar - or unquestioningly adulatory [of which I presume there are many for Savarkar].

He pointed out that Savarkar was not a 'believing Hindu'. He ate meat and fish despite being a Chitpavan Brahmin and advocated eating beef. He was an avowed atheist and dismissive of the plethora of Hindu divinities. Interestingly, Jinnah, who Nandy mentioned as the representative of Muslim nationalism in South Asia, wasn't a practicing Muslim either and quoted an interview of M.C.Chhagla (Jinnah's nephew) in which he said one of his duties as Jinnah's secretary was to make sure he did not have to receive religiously minded visitors who might disturb him while enjoying his whiskey or a ham sandwich.

Among the various nineteenth century religious reform movements in South Asia all the Hindu and Buddhist ones and some (though not all) Islamic ones were (in Nandy's opinion) a reaction to the challenge posed by evangelising Christianity and represented a desire to "become in some ways like the enemy they wished to resist, the better to resist it".

That this was also the inspiration behind both Hindu and Muslim religious nationalisms. Speaking specifically of Savarkar, Dr. Nandy said, having studied European history and political theory he had come to the conclusion that a modern nation state had to be based on a dominant 'national identity' (respectively Hindu or Muslim) and minorities "tamed". This, Nandy said, is only emulating the examples set by England where Catholics were systematically marginalised and France where protestants were targeted. [These are Dr. Nandy's views.] Nandy pointed out that Savarkar had always had the most cordial relations with Jinnah and (apparently) completely sympathised with the demand for partition.

He had a fascinating riff on modern day fundamentalisms being attempted solutions to the problem faced by greater mobility.

Why is this a problem ? Well, before the nineteenth century - being a devout Hindu (or to some extent Muslim) meant following practices that were necessarily local, in a language that was local, worshipping aspects of divinity (whether deities, saints or whatever) which were also local. These things didn't travel well in case the devotee had to move long distances. As mobility increased - a need arose in the minds of some - to make faith portable like a laptop. The tensions that we see today are in some ways the results of this.

Savarkar was tortured at Andaman and this probably explains his offer to cooperate with the British authorities and the reduction of his prison sentence (initially condemned to two life sentences).

In an aside he said that in democratic India it is far easier for a Dalit (or some other minority) to be the head of the state government in 'communal' Maharashtra than in 'Communist' West Bengal. He said this in response to a question about why Gandhi's most bitter internal enemies were Chitpavan Brahmins from Maharashtra, the bhadralok babus of Bengal and - to a lesser extent - Tamil Brahmins.

In his introduction he was described (using text he had prepared) as a 'post-secular' intellectual. I meant to ask him to explain this but it slipped my mind, there were so many interesting threads to pick.

The defense attorney to Nathuram Godse (Gandhi's assassin) has recorded Godse's disappointment that Savarkar not only did not own up to his role in the assassination plot but deliberately distanced himself from the plotters and did not show any support or sympathy for them. [Savarkar narrowly avoided conviction in the case. Subsequent enquiry brought damning evidence to light.]

While I have always admired Nandy's writings, I came away with a very positive impression of his attention to detail and genuine dedication to scholarship.

Here is a report on another talk by Ashis Nandy, carried in India West:

Hate Not Last Word in Partition: Nandy

by Ashfaque Swapan

It was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition, iconoclastic Indian researcher Ashis Nandy told an audience March 3 at the University of California.

Nandy made some unconventional points: Even in the terrible bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions, as many as one in four people among survivors said they were saved by the other community, and their fondest memories were still of the days when they lived with the ostensibly enemy community. He added that while those who engaged in the killings virtually got off scot-free, they paid a price in terms of mental and physical health and some even accepted culpability in their later age.

Nandy was the featured speaker at the Sarah Kailath lecture here.

UC Berkeley sociology Prof Raka Ray, chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, introduced him as an “intellectual extraordinaire” who was India’s first post colonial theorist, calling him a “prototypical public intellectual” and India’s most famous dissenter.

“I am a little perturbed by my steady decline into respectability, and I do not know what to do about it,” quipped Nandy, who brought an avuncular bonhomie to hislecture.

Nandy highlighted his presentation with gripping stories of individuals caught in the maelstrom of murder, hatred and exile in 1946-48.

According to conservative estimates, roughly one million people died, but Nandy puts the figure to over two million.

Nandy and associates carried out a study that included about 1,300 interviews with survivors of the Partition violence of 1946-48, including 100 in-depth interviews.

“When we started the study, we depended heavily on available data on other genocides, and I must say some of the things did not fit,” Nandy said.

“The first finding that surprised us that nearly one-fourth of all survivors said that they owed their survival to somebody from the opposition,” he said. “This figure was astonishing because nowhere we have come anywhere near it — in any other genocide.”

Another surprising finding was the lack of rancor among direct victims, he said.

“The second finding is … that those who actually faced the violence, those who are direct victims, the first generation of victims, those who have been subject to the violence, those who have seen it first-hand, mostly were those who had lesser prejudice and lesser bitterness about their experience than their own children and their grandchildren because they had lived in communities where the other side was the majority,” Nandy said. “They have lived with them and they had very warm memories of that experience. Many of them have said that those were the best days of their lives, whereas the children have a packaged view mostly of those violent days and how the family survived . . . So they carry more bitterness, more hostility.”

Nandy focused on an individual to underscore some of his points. During the research on the Partition, an associate had interviewed Madan Lal Pahwa, who was raised in what is now Pakistan.

Raised in a “kattar” (orthodox) Hindu family, Pahwa grew up to become a Hindu militant. He participated in vigilante groups that killed Muslims, said Nandy, and even threw a bomb at a prayer meeting of Mahatma Gandhi five days before Gandhi’s assassination.

Many years later, during an interview for the research, Pahwa appeared to have mellowed considerably.

What was Pahwa’s most treasured memory? “It is Pak Pattan (his ancestral village in Pakistan),” Nandy said. “And what he remembers in Pak Pattan the most, not only what he called the pure air and the pure milk and the green vegetables . . . above all (Muslim Sufi spiritual leader) Baba Farid’s mazar (tomb). He used to sneak out at night from his home . . . and with his friends go to the mazar (saint's tomb-shrine).

That Sufi music and the singing he remembers as the most valuable moments of his life. The memory of the shared shrine, the Sufi music, the ambiance of the mazar had left a deep impression on him.”

“In South Asia, living with multiple selves is not an exception, we don’t diagnose it as schizophrenia,” Nandy quipped.

“I don’t think you should be surprised that even Madan Lal Pahwa showed at least some awareness somewhere that he was culpable,” he said.

“Fanaticism drives a person but insaniyat — humanity — is also there,” Nandy said. Nandy also mentioned a “third striking feature of this genocide.”

“I have yet to meet, or any of our team has yet to meet, a killer who is happy in his old age,” he said. “I am yet to meet a happy killer.

Even the ones that claim to be at perfect peace with themselves eitherhave psychosomatic ailments or other instances of mental ill health directly traceable to the experience during the violence of '46-48. So escaping prosecution is not the last word in this matter.”

India’s pre-partition history of various communities living together was the result of a pre-Western tradition of tolerance, Nandy said.

This became clear after he researched the 600-year history of communal peace in the Kerala port city of Kochi.

The initial response of people, when asked about their history of peace, was predictable.

“They gave all the responses people like us would love,” Nandy said. People said that the absence of violence was because people were secular, progressive and educated.

However, said Nandy, deeper examination revealed something else.

“Nobody liked anybody else. Tolerance, alas, was based on mutual dislike,” he said. “Every community thought they were the best. Yet in Cochin there was no instance of serious violence in 600 years of recorded history.

“And then gradually I deciphered that in a community-based society, a society where individuation has not gone beyond a point, there is bound to be this dislike and this sense of superiority. . .

“But whereas you think your community is the best you also learn the (other) community’s right to believe they are the best. That mutuality is there. Secondly, the other is not only the other, but they are a part of you, you internalize. . . . The other is crucial to your self-definition. . . There are no annihilatory fantasies. . .

“This is not the enlightenment vision of cosmopolitanism, it is the alternative form of cosmopolitanism, and I am now convinced that this is the cosmopolitanism with which societies based on communities survive.”

He said that the most bitter opponents of Gandhi, including his killers, didn’t dislike him mainly because of his perceived appeasement of Muslims. Gandhi’s critics in India hated him because they thought he was too mired in tradition to allow India to develop as a modern state, Nandy said.

However, that may have been Gandhi’s strong suit, Nandy suggested.

“Somewhere Gandhi’s strength lay not in conforming to the ideas of proper politics of modern India and middle classes, that in any case found him a liability and a problem, people like you and me, perhaps his strength lay partly in the folk traditions of India, in the realities of India that is outside the reach of modern India,” Nandy said.

The Return of the Sacred

These recent lecture by Ashis Nandy brought to mind a lecture by Nandy I attended, at Calcutta University's Centre for South and South-East Asian Studies, in January 2008.

Visiting the Centre again last week, I found they had published the lecture.

It was titled "The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and the Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World".

It was presented earlier, in 2006, in Sydney, and an MP3 audio file of that lecture is accessible here.

On the subject of the partition of India, a must-read article is by Ayesha Jalal: "Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia". This is accessible here.